Sunday, July 18, 2010

Second Hand Report From The American Society of Naval Engineers Symposium

rschaffer8 at Talk Polywell gives a third hand report of a second hand report about the symposium.

The American Society of Naval Engineers held a symposium on "Engineering the Total Ship" on July 14 and 15. The session titled “Technology for the Future Navy” was moderated by Dr. John Pazik, Director, Ship Systems and Engineering Division, Office of Naval Research. I was not in attendance at the meeting, but a colleague in his meeting report and follow-up discussions with me indicated that Dr. Pazik made several favorable references to Polywell Fusion to the point where my colleague immediately did a google search to find out more. Although I don’t know specifically what Dr. Pazik said and I don’t know who was in attendance at this session, I believe it is significant that he would mention it in this forum. The meeting was attended by about 130 naval engineers and analysts including nine admirals constituting the leadership of the Navy’s engineering establishment. Ron O’Rourke, a very influential naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service was also in attendance. I do not know if Dr. Pazik’s comments reflected any preliminary results of the ongoing ONR funded research at EMC2. However, I don’t think Dr. Pazik would jeopardize his professional reputation or ONR’s before such an influential audience if he did not believe Pollywell Fusion had genuine technical potential. More information on the symposium is available at: Engineering the Total Ship

I think this means the experiments to date show promise. I will try to get more details.

1 comment:

Guys, for what it's worth... My fiancé and I were honeymooning in Maui and bumped into another couple. We stumbled through several discussion topics while waiting for the sun to set. The last part of the conversation turned from the BP spill to energy independence. "Oh, we are very close to that goal, closer than some people think," said the gentleman. "Really," I responded, "what business are you in?"... "My wife and I work for the NIF and there are some big annoucements coming in the next 30-60 days." That's when I piped up and asked, "Interesting, you guys have been making noise about net-power for some time, I don't suppose you have had time to study the latest version of Bussard's IEC concept call the "wiffleball", you know they got funded to build their large-scale model which, if it proves success visa vie Bussards scaling principle, it might be game set match?"

He looked really nervous at this point and asked, "Who do you work for again??" That was the end of that conversation... I suppose he figured I worked for an agency that doesn't want him spreading rumors LOL

Anyway, weather he was engaging in simple excitement or not, I would guess that there is a real competitive strain between these competing systems; with 1000's of livelihoods attached to success or failure.